Friday, January 11, 2019

Down with pronouns

Is it too much to ask? Let pronouns be pronouns, and let antecedents -- even the first-out-of-the-cliche-bag ones like "missing teen" and "abductor" -- do the heavy lifting in headlines? I know all the cool kids these days are writing deliberately vague heds, but come on. Even Fox (despite the adjective overload and the little oops with the "allegedly" thing; compare top and bottom) did better:

Back to CNN, though: Further points off for any headline that begins with "What we know about" or ends with "Here's what we know." Forbidden under all circumstances, at least until a neighbor has described the suspect as a quiet fella who kept to himself. And don't say "Here's a photo of ..." when what you have is a link, especially when it's a link to the same photo you've already shown.